It is well known in various industries to use robots in the assembly of large quantities of manufactured goods. Robots are used in the automated assembly of automobiles, circuit boards, computers, the manufacture of food, and many other items. Robots provide advantages over manual labor and cost savings in view of their ability to perform boring and repetitive tasks very well with minimal error.
One such task is the painting of automobile exterior body parts. Similar material dispensing robots are also used in general industries for the manufacture of airplane components, windmills, buses, trains and the like. Although robots provide a clear time savings advantage in operation, setting up a robot to perform a specific task is a cumbersome process. For example, in paint application processes, care must be taken so that desired paint coverage is obtained with minimal waste.
It will be appreciated that it is desirable to program a predetermined path, sometimes referred to as a trajectory, of a robot arm which carries an implement that performs the task as quickly and efficiently as possible. However it has been found that quick changes in implement motion result in damage to the implement. For example, it is believed that a gyroscopic effect caused by the robot reorientation (wrist motion) is one of the main reasons for a painting device's atomizer turbine to cause “touch down,” wherein a rotor of the dispenser comes in contact with a stator. The turbine's bearing air “cushion” is designed to maintain spacing between the stator and rotor during operational speeds of 10,000 to 70,000 RPM. However, sudden changes in the robot's wrist motion overcomes the air cushion and results in damage to the atomizer turbine. Such damage to the turbine, which is an expensive part, results in machine downtime and less-than-ideal distribution of paint. Therefore, there is a need in the art to simulate motion of an implement carried by a robotic arm to determine where in the robot arm's trajectory path damaging dynamics take place and to adjust the path so as not to adversely affect the implement and its associated function.